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IMDbPro

8½

  • 19631963
  • Not RatedNot Rated
  • 2h 18m
IMDb RATING
8.0/10
117K
YOUR RATING
POPULARITY
3,626
158
8½ (1963)
Trailer for 8 1/2
Play trailer1:57
4 Videos
99+ Photos
Drama
A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.
IMDb RATING
8.0/10
117K
YOUR RATING
POPULARITY
3,626
158
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Director
      • Federico Fellini
    • Writers
      • Federico Fellini(story)
      • Ennio Flaiano(story)
      • Tullio Pinelli(screenplay)
    • Stars
      • Marcello Mastroianni
      • Anouk Aimée
      • Claudia Cardinale
    Top credits
    • Director
      • Federico Fellini
    • Writers
      • Federico Fellini(story)
      • Ennio Flaiano(story)
      • Tullio Pinelli(screenplay)
    • Stars
      • Marcello Mastroianni
      • Anouk Aimée
      • Claudia Cardinale
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 305User reviews
    • 129Critic reviews
    • 91Metascore
    • Won 2 Oscars
      • 19 wins & 9 nominations total

    Videos4

    8 1/2
    Trailer 1:57
    8 1/2
    8 1/2
    Trailer 4:00
    8 1/2
    8 1/2 NEW Trailer
    Trailer 1:59
    8 1/2 NEW Trailer
    '8 1/2' Anniversary Mashup
    Video 1:01
    '8 1/2' Anniversary Mashup

    Photos204

    Claudia Cardinale in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni and Eddra Gale in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée in 8½ (1963)
    Barbara Steele in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ (1963)
    Federico Fellini in 8½ (1963)
    Claudia Cardinale in 8½ (1963)
    Sandra Milo in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ (1963)
    Federico Fellini and Claudia Cardinale in 8½ (1963)
    Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ (1963)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Marcello Mastroianni
    Marcello Mastroianni
    • Guido Anselmi
    Anouk Aimée
    Anouk Aimée
    • Luisa Anselmi
    • (as Anouk Aimee)
    Claudia Cardinale
    Claudia Cardinale
    • Claudia
    Sandra Milo
    Sandra Milo
    • Carla
    Rossella Falk
    Rossella Falk
    • Rossella
    Barbara Steele
    Barbara Steele
    • Gloria Morin
    Madeleine Lebeau
    Madeleine Lebeau
    • Madeleine - l'attrice francese
    Caterina Boratto
    Caterina Boratto
    • La signora misteriosa
    Eddra Gale
    Eddra Gale
    • La Saraghina
    • (as Edra Gale)
    Guido Alberti
    • Pace - il produttore
    Mario Conocchia
    • Conocchia - il direttore di produzione
    Bruno Agostini
    • Bruno - il secondo segretario di produzione
    Cesarino Miceli Picardi
    • Cesarino - l'ispettore di produzione
    Jean Rougeul
    Jean Rougeul
    • Carini - il critico cinematografico
    Mario Pisu
    • Mario Mezzabotta
    Yvonne Casadei
    • Jacqueline Bonbon
    Ian Dallas
    Ian Dallas
    • Il partner della telepata
    Mino Doro
    Mino Doro
    • L'agente di Claudia
    • Director
      • Federico Fellini
    • Writers
      • Federico Fellini(story) (screenplay)
      • Ennio Flaiano(story) (screenplay)
      • Tullio Pinelli(screenplay)
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      8½ was shot, like almost all Italian movies at the time, completely without sound recording on set. All dialogue was dubbed during post production. Fellini was known for shouting direction at his actors during shooting, and for rewriting dialogue afterwards, making a lot of the dialogue in the movie appear out-of-sync. (Source: High-def Digest)
    • Goofs
      When Guido visits the cardinal in the mud bath, the cardinal is sitting in a chair, fully dressed in his cassock, as two attendants use a sheet to form a curtain around him; however, as the camera cuts to a closer angle, the cardinal is suddenly undressed to the waist.
    • Quotes

      Claudia: I don't understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?

      Guido: Because he no longer believes in it.

      Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.

      Guido: Because it isn't true that a woman can change a man.

      Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.

      Guido: And above all because I don't feel like telling another pile of lies.

      Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.

    • Alternate versions
      In the American theatrical release version, Rodgers & Hart's "Blue Moon" can be heard twice: the first time, when it's played by strolling strings near the shopping plaza where Guido meets up with his wife, Luisa; the second time, when Guido goes out for a drive with the "real" Claudia. However, in the original Italian release, the song played in both scenes is "Sheik of Araby." The Criterion laserdisc features "Blue Moon," but it's "Sheik of Araby" on the DVD, possibly due to the use of different source materials.
    • Connections
      Edited into Bellissimo: Immagini del cinema italiano (1985)
    • Soundtracks
      The Ride of the Valkyries
      from "Die Walküre"

      Composed by Richard Wagner

    User reviews305

    Review
    Review
    Top review
    10/10
    This movie taught me a new "language"
    It's been said before: Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a fictitious, 43-year-old film director with a personal crisis that stunts his creative flow and his inability to get on with his new film after the enormous success of his previous one. The character is iconically brought to life by the immortal Mastroianni with artificially greyed hair and is universally identified as an alter ego of Fellini himself.

    The first time I saw 8½ I was in my teens and hated it. I then rewatched it only a few years later, in my early 20s, and something miraculous happened. It was probably a pivotal moment in my film-viewing experience: it suddenly gave me new parametres by which to judge movies and even art in general. I suddenly learnt this new language, so much more beautiful and sophisticated than anything I had heard before. What was most amazing was that after the first negative experience, I had somehow tapped into this language's secret, and it wasn't in the least bit hermetic or difficult, though more complex and sophisticated than other languages I already knew. Many of the movies I'd considered greats became amateurish or dwarfish in comparison.

    To me, this was no longer simply a movie, but Art in a more universal sense of the word, Art that just IS and has nothing to strive for or prove. Which is why I find it so nonsensical and contradictory to call something like 8½ "pretentious" - to me, pretentious is when an insecure auteur is trying consciously and hard to be profound, difficult, original, ground-breaking, and you can see their intent clearly, and detect the effort behind the artifice. Nothing of any of this is anywhere to be perceived in 8½, which makes creating masterpieces look easy.

    I admit that 8½ is not an easy movie, nor one for everyone. Visually, fewer movies are as iconic, memorable, original, poetic, funny, inventive, allegorical, exhilarating.

    The scenes I love are too many to mention, but here are just a few: The steam bath scene when in an odd procession/ritual, the patients are being led into what must be a Turkish bath. All the steam surrounding them, the men wearing sheets that look like shrouds or togas, all looking like mock-ancient Roman dignitaries... Then, through a loud-speaker Mastroianni-Anselmi is told the dried-up, turkey-like Cardinal, will now condescend to meeting him. Before Guido rushes off to meet the Cardinal, all his friends and colleagues beg him to put in a good word for them. This is such a gleeful stab at Italy's grovelling, nepotistic culture of ingratiating oneself to the powers-that-be by paying them lip-service even for the most petty personal advantages. Then Guido stands before the embodiment of Catholic paternalism and his obsequious minions. And everything is at its most pompous and lifeless - this dusty, mummified institution is less in touch with the humanity it's supposed to comfort and advise than it is possible to believe.

    I also love the character of Guido's mistress, Carla, played by Sandra Milo at her gaudiest and most voluptuous. Though initially it's difficult to understand what Guido would have seen in her, eventually it become more apparent. Meeting his wife Luisa, you see how well the two women's ways of being complement one another. See for example how she reacts in a simple, good-humoured, self-deprecating way when in the café scene, Guido's elegant, neurotic wife played by Anouk Aimée at her most androgynously attractive - mockingly compliments Carla's tacky outfit for its "elegance". In such instances one gets a sense that though Fellini is parodying his subjects, he also has a fundamental love and human compassion for them.

    The prostitute La Saraghina is probably one of the most memorable female characters put to film ever. She is probably somewhere in her 50s and rougher than sandpaper, overweight yet strangely fit and voluptuous, with lots of scary, wild dark hair, overdone raccoon eye make-up caked onto her aggressive, striking, sardonic face as she sits and dances on the lonely beach in Rimini next to her war bunker-home. Guido is fascinated by what is "young and yet ancient", eternal, meaning what is muse-like, archetypically, like the divinely beautiful Claudia character, perfectly embodied by Claudia Cardinale (the ultimate director's muse rather than a real woman or mistress). La Saraghina may not be a young woman like Claudia, she may not represent spontaneity and fresh, uncluttered artistic inspiration like she does, but she is also a muse of sorts - the muse of guilt-free pleasure and non-self-conscious, free, unidealised, earthy femininity. All this is La Saraghina - the town's young boys respond to this in her (including Guido as a child) and are bewitched by her and pay to her to see her demonic yet liberating, visceral dance.

    I have so much more to say about this movie, for instance about Nino Rota's memorable score, or how the movie's non-linear structure and juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes emulates the rhythm and mood of dreams to perfection. Also, the scenes featuring Guido's parents and their embodiment of the emotional blackmail, that eternal sense of guilt and the stunting of individuality that the paternalistic institution of family at its most traditional represents in Italy. Or of Guido's touching childhood memories, of the wonderful way in which the movie ends, in a merry-go-round of what really matters in life, when all else has been swiped aside and all that remains is the desire to cherish (with all their imperfections) all those who have really mattered most in our lives...
    helpful•218
    53
    • Asa_Nisi_Masa2
    • Feb 22, 2006

    FAQ4

    • Is this movie based on a novel?
    • What does the 8½ in the title stand for?
    • What make of sunglasses was Guido wearing?

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • June 24, 1963 (United States)
    • Countries of origin
      • Italy
      • France
    • Official sites
      • Official site
      • Zazie Films (Japan)
    • Languages
      • Italian
      • French
      • English
      • German
    • Also known as
      • Eight and a Half
    • Filming locations
      • Tivoli, Rome, Lazio, Italy
    • Production companies
      • Cineriz
      • Francinex
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $98,760
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $11,947
      • Apr 11, 1999
    • Gross worldwide
      • $196,375
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Technical specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      2 hours 18 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.72 : 1
      • 1.85 : 1

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